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Best Student Offers - Compare Credit Cards for College Students
In our opinion, the best student offers are the ones that have the lowest interest rates available. School related expenses are very high and because it is difficult to generate substantial income as a student, interest accrual, especially from high rate offers, can act as a disease to your financial health. In general, the interest rates for college cards are higher than those of general consumer offers for those with good to excellent credit. This is true because the average age of a traditional person enrolled in a university, meaning one that went stright from high school to college, is 18-19. Therefore, they have fresh, clean credit histories. Though this is attractive and banks like to establish relationships that may last decades with this applicant pool, the interest rates are justified because the banks can't gather enough data about the person or whether or not they will use their products responsibly. It's an unfortunate policy, but from an economic standpoint it makes sense.
Comparing Student Credit Cards
Because the options are alot more limited, which is due in part to the current state of the economy, it is vital to compare student credit cards. Some of the banks who have not quite recovered from the woes of a down economy have not lowered interest rates for the student cards in their portfolio. Others who are starting to right themselves have lowered the rates and have even re-introduced 0% intro APR's to some of them.
Look at the interest rates first. It's easy to focus on other attributes of a card, but this is the most important. In all likelihood, as a student there are going to be some billing cycles where you will be forced to pay less than your balance. Computers become out-dated, phones die, and books are extremely over-priced (at least in our opinion). It's inevitable that one of these or maybe something similar may affect you at some point. Because of this, a thorough examination of the pricing structures of the credit cards that you are interested in is vital. It is also useful to identify whether the card is a fixed rate or variable rate credit card.
Secondly, take a look at whether or not the credit card has an introductory term. No matter how old you are, taking advantage of 0% credit cards is beneficial. It's virtually the same thing as an interest free loan. If this is your first relationship with a Visa, Discover, or MasterCard, it doesn't really matter all that much wether or not the intro APR applies to balance transfers. The time period in which you have to transfer a balance is usually between the time the account is opened and 90 days. Assuming that you don't have another card with a balance, this doesn't matter and the likelihood of you opening multiple different accounts, driving up balances, and then needing to transfer them all in a 90 day period is highly unlikely. Therefore, a 0% purchase rate makes an offer the best student credit card if it's competition only has one for balance transfers.
Take a look at the rewards program and other perks. The rewards program is not nearly as important because student credit lines really don't permit large point accrual. There are ways to bypass the credit line limits to earn more with rewards by paying off your balance several times a month. Again, most college students don't have much disposable income to pay off bills, and quite frankly, the spend required to actually redeem anything of substance on a rewards credit card is rather high. This is why in this case, rewards programs are not nearly as important when you compare student credit cards, and reflected as such during your comparison. There was a time when colleges allowed you to pay tuition with plastic but most schools have strayed away from this due to the transaction fees. This would be a great case for rewards cards, but it isn't nearly as common, and as stated previously, you probably won't end up with a credit line that would cover tuition.
Finally, additional "cool" things like monograms, interesting or customized card art, should not be large factors in your decision making process. Though these things are neat, especially in the case of card customization where you can upload a photo to be displayed on your card, they should not be influencial factors when making a decision unless you are comparing two cards that are virtually identical other than that feature. The bottom line is that these are financial products and you want to shop for the best student credit card that will save you the most money, just as you will hopefully do later in life when you compare mortgages.
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